Repeal and Ulster Protestants - The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps)
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and I will garrison the island for you, and hold it, as your liegeman and vassal for ever.'
"Do you not know in your very hearts, that this is true? and still you are 'loyal' and attached to the institutions of the country!
"I tell you, frankly, that I, for one, am not 'loyal.' I am not wedded to the Queen of England, nor unalterably attached to the House of Brunswick. In fact, I love my own barn better than I love that House. The time is long past when Jehovah anointed kings. The thing has long since grown a monstrous imposture, and has been already, in some civilized countries, detected as such, and drummed out accordingly. A modern king, my friends, is no more like an ancient anointed shepherd of the people than an archbishop's apron is like the Urim and Thummin. There is no divine right now but in the sovereign people.
"And, for the 'institutions of the country,' I loathe and despise them; we are sickening and dying of these institutions, fast; they are consuming us like a plague, degrading us to paupers in mind, body, and estate,—yes, making our very souls beggarly and cowardly. They are a failure and a fraud, these institutions;—from the topmost crown-jewel to the meanest detective's note-book, there is no soundness in them. God and man are weary of them. Their last hour is at hand; and I thank God that I live in the days when I shall witness the utter downfall, and trample upon the grave, of the most portentous, the grandest, meanest, falsest, and cruellest tyranny that ever deformed this world.
"These, you think, are strong words: but they are not one whit stronger than the feelings that prompt them—that glows this moment deep in the souls of moving and awakening millions of our fellow-countrymen of Ireland; ay, and in your souls, too, Protestants of Ulster, if you would acknowledge it to yourselves. I smile at the formal resolution about 'loyalty to Queen Victoria,' so eagerly passed and hurried over as a dubious kind of form at Tenant-right meetings and 'Protestant Repeal' meetings. I laughed outright, here, on Tuesday night last, at the suspicious warmth with which Dublin merchants, as if half-afraid of themselves, protested so anxiously that they would yield in loyalty to none. They, democrats by nature and position, meeting there, without a nobleman to countenance them,—with the Queen's representative scowling black upon them from his castle,—are, they declare it with most nervous solemnity, loyal men. Indeed, it was easy to see that a vague feeling was upon them of the real meaning and tendency of all these meetings,—of what all this must end in, and to what haven they, and you, and we, are all, in a happy hour, inevitably drifting together.
"My friends, the people's sovereignty, the land and sea and air of Ireland for the people of Ireland: this is the gospel that the heavens and the earth are preaching, and that all hearts are secretly burning to embrace. Give up for ever that old interpretation you put upon the word 'Repeal.' Repeal is no priest-movement; it is no sectarian movement; it is no money swindle, nor 'Eighty-two' delusion, nor puffery, nor O'Connellism, nor Mullaghmast 'green-cap' stage-play, nor loud-sounding inanity of any sort, got up for any man's profit or ...continue reading »
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